Ongoing political instability in the region has caused a rise in hacktivism

With the ongoing political instability in the Middle East region and resulting rise of political hacktivism, DDoS attacks are on the increase, according to Alex Giannikoulis, founder and CEO of professional IT services expert The Apex Group.

Add the political instability to the ridiculous ease of purchasing a Low Orbit Ion Cannon attack on your chosen target for as little as $5 on the internet and you have a growing threat to both enterprises and governments.

“There was an advert on YouTube where a guy was selling DDoS attacks. You pay them to bring down other people’s sites. DDoS attacks have moved away from extremely educated or geeky kind of guys doing it to a very mainstream and very simple type of attack,” said Giannikoulis.

Politically motivated attacks plus lower barrier to entry to complete DDoS attacks, plus the susceptibility to DDoS attacks in many Middle East enterprises means that this region is ripe for these attacks.

“Many of the enterprises here are low hanging fruit, ripe for DDoS attacks. I don’t say that in a bad way, I just think it is a pretty easy way to make a strong statement. You don’t even have to take and data or steal anything from anyone, just bringing down a site can be big enough and to get that back up is really difficult,” Giannikoulis said.

The Apex Group sees hundreds of gigs per second attacks taking place in some enterprises, that kind of volume is bigger than some countries entire bandwidth backbone. When DDoS attacks happen, the easy thing for an ISP to do is to take the enterprise down and black hole its traffic because it is clogging up the network, and that is what the DDoS attackers want.